Testing General Relativity with NuSTAR data of Galactic Black Holes

Ashutosh Tripathi, Yuexin Zhang, Askar B. Abdikamalov, Dimitry Ayzenberg, Cosimo Bambi, Jiachen Jiang, Honghui Liu, Menglei Zhou

Published 2020-12-19Version 1

Einstein's theory of General Relativity predicts that the spacetime metric around astrophysical black holes is described by the Kerr solution. In this work, we employ state-of-the-art in relativistic reflection modeling to analyze a selected set of NuSTAR spectra of Galactic black holes to obtain the most robust and precise constraints on the Kerr black hole hypothesis possible today. Our constraints are much more stringent than those from other electromagnetic techniques, and with some sources we get stronger constraints than those currently available from gravitational waves.